Marshall Herskovitz Quotes

I believe in giving people an opportunity to do their jobs.

A lot of people think that success is luck and being in the right place at the right time. But I think if you’re willing to work harder than anybody else, you can create an awful lot of your own luck.

I'm in a fortunate position that sometimes you just get offered roles - they're not necessarily the roles you take, but to get offered a film is amazing. I think the work you've done before that is why you get it.

I don't think you should sit around and wait for people to give you an opportunity to express yourself or do your work, or whatever. Actors have to be producers and writers have to be producers.

It's a great wake-up call for our entire industry: What movies are we making? What storytellers are we allowing to tell the stories? What people are we allowing to be cast in those stories? I think we need newer stories, and more people given the opportunity to do anything they want.

The thing that changes your professional life, your capabilities, your learning, your understanding, your opportunity flow, your ability to make things happen, is the center relationships you have with powerful and effective people around you in the industry, in the activity that you want to be doing.

Well, some people create their own opportunities; others go where opportunities are the greatest; others fail to recognize opportunity when they are face to face with it.

Most importantly, how impressive can I be to people that bought tickets, where they never feel, "It was pretty good." If anyone thinks my show was "pretty good," then I've completely failed. I think every comic should think that.

When filmmakers are kept from making films, there's a lot of different reasons why. Sometimes you work on a film and cast it and do all the work and can be just a month away from shooting, and all of a sudden, the whole thing goes up in smoke. But I do think the advent of a digital revolution is going to provide people with opportunities to make films that they never would have had before. I think you can do some pretty credible stuff now with very, very little money. Which I think is great for young filmmakers.

If you're a person and care about other people - I don't think I have any sort of special understanding or anything, I think any feeling person would experience similar things if given the same opportunities to see the things I've been lucky enough to see and meet the people I've been lucky enough to meet.

I think there's a million talented people out there, it's just a matter of luck a lot of the time. And good training, which we were lucky to have. And I think that's what people are curious about - other people, and what they're like.

It's important to keep auditioning. If you're auditioning for something, you're auditioning for a role that people can't see you in and you need to convince them that you're the right person.

I think title sequences are an opportunity to sort of set the stage or to get people thinking in different terms than maybe whatever they understand the movie to be going in.

I will say that I appreciate Hillary Clinton's awareness and passion for women. I think she is overqualified in the sense that she's been in the White House, so she knows the drill. I am hopeful that she will continue to support minorities and create better opportunities.

I think the Oscar So White campaign really sparked ... Because you didn't want to be the Oscars, so everybody in Hollywood was like, well, before the heat comes down. The Golden Globes diversified. Just everybody ended up diversifying as far as handing out awards to more diverse folks in Hollywood because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what your race is. If you're waking up every day and you're doing the work, you deserve an opportunity to be awarded like everybody else.

The thing I always say is that I wasn't going out reaching for roles, I wasn't fighting for roles - people came to me. They always came to me.

Money is very difficult to think about. So, we think about money as the opportunity cost of money. So, we at some point went to a Toyota dealership and we asked people, what will you not be able to do in the future if you bought this Toyota? Now, you would expect people to have an answer. But people were kind of shocked by the question. They never thought about it before. So, the most we got was people said, "Well, if I can't buy this Toyota, if I buy this Toyota, I can't buy a Honda." What is this thing? What is this value of price? Very hard to think about it.

I think you can judge the level of success for any group of people by the reaction against it.

Even if I weren't learning new roles and getting the opportunity to be coached by incredible people, I still think I would be so excited to have an opportunity to continue to push myself and grow, as an artist.

I think there's definitely much more opportunities for women now to find a role in 30s and 40s both. I think you're starting to find people really seeing that - here's the thing. It's hard for me to say and know the experience how it was ten, twenty years ago because I was only in my teens and my 20s, but I know from watching TV myself and watching film myself I see a lot more 30s and 40s on screen, which just makes me very, very happy. It's what we should be watching.

Having a good network can be invaluable. It opens doors for you and allows you to enter into opportunities that are beneficial to your business.

When you get that opportunity to be honest and open with somebody, for the first time, and share things about yourself that you haven't been able to share before, that you might be scared of or ashamed about, that's really exhilarating, and I think that's something that people will really identify with.

Youth. The fact that, in the mid-'90s, guys like Lee Fields gave me and all these young people the chance to do backup. I was in my 30s, but some of those guys were still teenagers. Others were 22 and 23 - babies, all of them.

Sometimes people confuse contrivance and authenticity, and sometimes I think authenticity can get in the way of a good excuse to do something theatrical. I just don't like wasting opportunity - if you're going to do a photo session, if you're going to walk on stage, why not make it interesting?